Hey folks, I'm a HNer. I created NewsBlur with Hacker News in mind the entire time. In fact, I thought up the idea during a summer NYC Hackers and Founders last year. For the past 16 months, I kept trying to pick a date when NewsBlur would be ready to submit. Finally, embarrassed as I am by the bugs galore, today is that day and I am glad to say that NewsBlur is far enough along to show off.

NewsBlur is an RSS feed reader that tries to do two things very well:

1) Shows you the original site instead of a context-less feed. Read the original and NewsBlur marks the stories you've read.

2) Filter stories you either like or dislike. A three-stop slider goes between dislike, neutral, and like (red, yellow, and green). Training is super-easy and all click-based (as opposed to you having to writing out what you like in a site, NewsBlur asks you, semi-Hunch-style, your opinions on facets of the site).

I started working on NewsBlur to see if I could do it. Put the AI together with the back-end feed processing and fetching, along with the nifty front-end of the original site. This is one of those projects where I just kept pushing in all directions until I felt I had something good, not knowing if I could do it at all, but believing the entire time that I was able to complete the project.

If you have a project kicking around in the back of your mind, just dedicate enough weeks and months to get it done and done well. Provided you do that, you're almost guaranteed to succeed in some way. Those first few months of writing NewsBlur, I felt like a fraud, wishing I could just get threaded feed fetching to not break every few minutes. Even what I considered to be simple python gave me headaches. (Turns out threading is evil, use multiprocessing instead.)

NewsBlur is entirely open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/. The iPhone app, the front-end JavaScript, and the back-end Python. Pick it apart, but know that it is more a learning experience than a business. Turning it into something profitable may not be easy, but I only need 80 premium users to make that happen.

4 very rare things just happened:

1) An application announcement on HN that genuinely appealed to me.

2) A single guy beat Google at UX in one of their best web applications (exposing the original site design for the feed is a fantastic idea!)

3) I paid for an application before it's ready.

4) I felt this was all so important I logged in to post this comment. :)

Kudos, you've done a fantastic job here. I really hope your environs permit you to keep this project going - it's a great idea, and I'm in love with it already!

One of the major problems I have with Reader is that certain low output feeds (making up the majority of my subscriptions) just seem to blend together - I forget why I subscribed to them, and have to go back to the original web page to try and figure out who the person is. Exposing the original page by default solves this beautifully. :)

Great work!

Edit: something I forgot. Visual display of the site allows me to instantly demonstrate RSS to my mother. Google Reader confused the hell out of her. :)

Very impressive, the UI stuff has clearly been thought about. At the same time, I found it a bit confusing. Also, landing straight in the app is cool, but it doesn't tell me how it's different, so I don't know why I would spend the time to figure it out.

It seems to have a lot of mysterious features like "instafetch" and "intelligence trainer" and stuff.

I guess I'm saying that my first impression is that it looks nice but complicated, like there's the promise of great stuff there but it seems like it would be hard to figure out. Compare with Google in the early days: great technology, crazy fast, but all that tech is hidden in the background and you don't see that, you just see the search box and the results.

Perhaps you've been too enamored with the cool/powerful features and haven't focused enough on keeping it simple?

But definitely awesome!

As a front-end engineer who used to work on Bloglines and helped create the Bloglines Beta, I say good luck! Your UI is very much like the Bloglines Beta and I realize this probably took a lot of work. Your challenges will probably be maintaining read state, security issues with trusting content in feeds, and keeping crawlers running so you don't miss items, searching content, handling archives, and more!

And of course, there's no money in this and the use of feeds are declining (so integrate Twitter and Facebook API).

Anyways, very nice. :)

Thoughts:

* FiveThirtyEight breaks your frames.

* I want a listing of all my unread articles to browse... I have >600 feeds and the list of blogs is long at just 64

* All NYTimes blogs seem broken? Freakonomics is super slow. An important feature of Google Reader is its aggressive pre-loading. When I click a headline, the feedback is instant. This keeps me reading (probably more than I should. Which is good for you, the feed reader seller.)

* On APOD, I just get a blinking cursor in the bottom window, and "original" mode works but "feed" and "story" don't seem to?

At this point, I'm just going to chalk it up to your site having issues, and check back again? http://img.skitch.com/20101026-tte8pqeksjx94syhuh7cbkt418.jp...

I really like your idea and will probably purchase it if it starts working. I'd also be happy to be a beta tester/constructive criticism provider/example of a heavy feed reader user.

Good call on making preset feeds loaded as soon as you open the page, lets you test it out right away. Instant engagement.

Also, it uses Google Reader shortcuts + imports feeds. Making the transition easy.

Excellent way to present a product versus a strong competitor.

Google Reader import ftw. I would have just looked and kept moving if I hadn't spotted that on the right.

Well played sir, well played.

This is great. One comment: I'm not sure why the landing page has a blank central column taking over 1/3 of the space with nothing. Apparently it never fills, what am I missing?

This looks great and releasing the source is certainly very generous of you. Definitely inspiring.

edit: I'm totally cloning this repo in case you change your mind :P

Okay sir, you've raked in 166 points on HN (33.2/hour), we expect a full emblogification on what happens next with this/you.

I'm going to be curious mainly about what kind of spikes you get in your traffic, paid accounts, and leads to other publicity.

Some great ideas, but still missing smart deduping. This is a real pain when having master feeds and aggregators that might also include those feeds: you may see the same story on the same site multiple times as each aggregation displays it. It would be nice if a tool recognized that it's been read and marks it as read in all the aggregation feeds someone might also have in the same folder.

I can tell you made some very conscious choices about how to position the premium version of this tool, but from my perspective I think you've erred too far on the side of caution. I would recommend 3 changes that would keep the spirit of "not in your face" premium pushing, and yet increase the take-rate on paid customers.

* Be up-front (on the landing page) about what you get for free and simply allude to the fact that a power-user option is available

* The dashboard needs to know if I'm using this enough to warrant a premium account. On a dashboard note: once I've clicked a feed, I need an easy path back to the dashboard.

* I need to be able to broadcast somehow that I'm using this. If I "like" a story, why can't I have a goo.gl shortened url to the story wrapped by NewsBlur post to my twitter/facebook??

Great work overall!!

Wow, awesome. This looks very very slick, and the Google Reader direct import is just...nice!

Bug report, though: A couple of my blogs that I chose to "turn on" only show up as their comments feed. If I go ahead and turn them on, and click on the feed itself in the left pane, I get the site (fair enough), but the list of items in the bottom pane then only shows up the comments feed items. And clicking on them takes me to the comments. weird.

Haven't been able to figure out why. E.g. the XKCD blag (http://blag.xkcd.com) and Cheap Talk (http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com) feeds.

p.s: when this bug is fixed, and archiving support added, I'm totally premium-ing - hold me to it! Great work once again!

You've done a really good job here. A news reader that lets me both rate news, theoretically learns my preferences over time, and lets me read the entire article without clicking more than once, is a serious package. (Why can't other readers get those things right?) My only problem is I'd prefer a native reader app to a web-based one, just because the major upside of using a reader is that it's constantly fetching and storing my feeds so there's no wait when I want to go read some news. I may check out your iPhone app though.

How has Django been working out for you?

Congrats on going from 'half-baked' to launch in 3 days!

Now that you've launched, can you take a look at the Hacker News 100 feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/newsyc100)?

Also, I don't know if this is intentional, but the feed view for a subreddit shows the subreddit page, and each item in the feed just scrolls through that page (instead of taking me to the comments of each link)

Maybe I've allowed Dave Winer undue influence over me in this regard, but I can't see giving up Google Reader's All Items "river of news" view. Are there plans to offer this presentation style in NewsBlur for those of us who'd rather not visit the original sites? It doesn't seem incompatible with the AI management feature, especially if you can do better than Reader's "sort by magic" setting.

How are you handling sites with frameuster scripts ?

So, I just signed up, been planning to write exactly this application for a few months now, but realized that I have to learn a lot more about neural networks to pull this off. You saved me a lot of time and effort.

Faced with the limit of 64 feeds, I even signed up to the paid version, but now it still only allows me to import 64 feeds.

Also, is an HTTPS version coming?

Very nice so far. Seems to be stalled on the GR import. I like the UI so far. I don't know how much of the learning I'll make use of -- I usually only follow feeds where I want to read most everything, so further discrimination isn't really helpful to me, but having a good UX on a feed reader that isn't Google's makes me happy.

This looks very cool, but can't replace GR(for me) for two reasons:

- The whole point of GR is I can read the original site even when it's not available - works nicely with restrictive filters etc.

- It's slower than GR - for obvious reasons.

However, it's great to see somebody taking a stab at an alternative news UI. Good luck on your project.

Interesting the fact that is definitely going again the trend of extracting content from websites to present it in a more readable format (instapaper, safari reader). I like the general interface, but I'm not a big fan of having to ready my rss crowded with ads and banners.

I don't use Google Reader, so I would love to have an option to import OPML files. Edit: Scratch that. Found the option I was looking for. But, don't like that uploading an OPML resets existing feed list. It should ideally check for duplicates and add the new entries.

Have you thought about using Google Reader as a backend instead of keeping your own database of feeds? It seems like that would cut down on your processing of the feeds and enable you to just work on the stuff you care about (the filtering and UI aspects of it).

Looks amazing to me, don't know yet if I'll be using it since I kinda prefer desktops apps, but I'm definitely going to try it for a while, and that's something that I almost never do regarding rss apps. Overall great great job. Best thing I've seen all month.

This UI looks very similar to MS outlook and I really it.However unlike outlook you cannot have all 3 panes vertically.On large screen ability display data into 3 vertical panes makes it more usable. are you planning to add this feature sometime in future?

-Why is there a "optionnal" label besides the password field?

-I really liked the little arrow, that we can lock on a page and allow us to create a bookmark like. It's innovative.

-It's really great that you released the source to the community!

Good luck!

I suspect the learning is not needed, I like the Google Reader learning because it's so straight forward. (what I read, I like)

I love the reading experience you've designed, though.

Awesome site! Upvoted.

Signed up and imported my Google Reader account, but some feeds are taking forever to load. Some other feeds don't show up at all after a while.

As an inveterate Google Reader user, I say well done! One problem: the "Preferences" dialog has no text, just two blank radio buttons (using Chrome).

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I get this error when I try to Google Reader import: http://grab.by/73TI

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If this ever takes off, you might be able to feature other blogs' feed on the demo page for a fee.

Says that an iPhone app is in the pipeline. Once that is done, please make one for Android also.

very cool! love the interface. just signed up and trying to import from google reader. fetching feed is happening but very slowly. hopefully its just because the server is overloaded temporarily.

Is it possible to: - change password - delete account

Very nice concept and UI ... great job!

One gripe: When you click an article it should open in a "_blank" window/tab. I hate having to click back.

Great stuff